Hello everyone. This is a insanely easy way to give any picture, skin, color... a human skin texture. And guess what, it's short. I took one of my pictures of my sim and opened it in Photoshop and did these few steps and my sim had human skin. It went from oily to humany. I posted it in another post but this is seperate so that someone can find it. I have added some other info to it also.

READY?

In photoshop. Go to Filter/Texture/Grain. Make sure the info is
like this:

Grain Type: Regular
Intensity: 5
Contrast: 50

Next Go to Filter/Texture/texturizer. Change info to:

Sandstone
Scaling: 50
Relief: 1
Light: bottom left (this can vary).
THAT'S IT! (If anyone can post a variation of this that makes even better skin, thats great).

HIGHLIGHTING
Now, many people wonder how people get those skins to shine so much. Well here is a basic way. Choose the lightest color on your skin using the eyedropper tool. The lightest color is usually what makes the skin shine. If you use the big feather bush with a very low opacity(1-20%), you can add more highlight areas. Using this color with the brush set to Linear Dodge instead of Normal will give you nice highlights. You can use Color Dodge also. Change the size of the feather brush for different areas. Nose size is different from cheek size.
WANT MORE?

SHADOWS
This is the same as highlighting exept for one thing. Instead of using Linear Dodge and Color Dodge, use Color Burn or Linear burn. Use the same opacity range.
WANT EVEN MORE?

QUICK TIP
This is quick hint on highlighting and shadowing. Clicking and draging the brush will give you a highlight or a shadow. However, this highlight or shadow wont be that intense. I was doing a lip and the light needed to be stronger on one part, so I tapped the the mouse button and the light grew. I kept tapping till it was light enough. It goes for shadows too.
I BET YOU WANT MORE!

Well, as of now I don't have more

I will get pictures and post them here. I want them to display how great this works so I will build a whole sim using these simple things. GO TRY IT. I KNOW IT WORKS.

CHOW

That does create a rather nice base texture. I could see how one could use this as an overlay to even out an overly-shiny skin and give a more realistic texture.

Couple tips along with making skintones that I've found along the way, that I'll share since we're on the subject:

Better than a big feather brush for handpainting highlights and shadows (for Photoshop CS or greater) are these brushes: http://www.digitalmediadesigner.com...le.jsp?id=30854 ... very realistic, very high res, and I love using 'em.

If you're going to do handpainting lights and darks, on a blank new layer on top, make a palette when you start, to give yourself a solid set of colours to eyedropper from. Suck up your base colour, make it lighter, and paint a solid swatch of that. Suck up the base colour again, make it darker, paint a swatch of that. Give yourself whatever variations you think you need. You'll keep your tone even if you do it that way, rather than resucking (eyedroppering) and changing colours each time. Seems simple, but it took me a while to figure this one out. *giggle*

You can also take bits of photos, cut them out, arrange them on the skin, erase and blend the edges, and then change them to Luminosity blend type, and reduce their opacity... This will give you some of the shading and tone of the photo, while retaining the texture of your base skin. The combination of this on a low opacity setting with a lot of handpainting, shading, and correction can be quite dramatic.

I'd like to see the pics of how you've been applying your technique.

Thank you Hysterical. Hysterical has a great tutorial: http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=169730

I would like to make this thread better by linking to another thread. In this thread several people give reference to other paint programs you could use instead of photoshop. I am sure there is a paint program that is free and can do those simple things mentioned in the first post. One that can do a grain effect and a sort of skins cell looking thing would probably do just as good, if not better. The thread I am posting is great. I would still like this thread to be a running tutorial.

ANY INPUT ON A CERTAIN TECHNIQUE USED TO MAKE A SKIN EFFECT IS VERY WELCOME.

I don't want this to be a photoshop thread, but I want it to be an idea
tutorial. Here is he link.

http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=49686

I HAVE ANOTHER ONE

FINGER AND TOE PAD TEXTURING

In Photoshop, go to Filter/Artistic/Rough Pastel.
Change the inf to this:

Stroke lenght: 0
Stroke detail: 1
Texture: Canvas
Scaling: 50%
Relief:14
Light: Bottom

This will give you a nice rigged look. It gives the texture of the bad of your fingers and toes. It actually looks like ashy pads since the light is coming from the Bottom (Use either Top or Bottom).
THAT'S IT

FOR THOSE OF YOU WITHOUT PHOTOSHOP
I get these little quickies by doing two things. When you look at a person from a far distance you see only one skin tone. This is the basic skintone of that person. This is what you start with. As you get closer to the person you start to see some light areas and some dark areas. When you get right up to the person you see everything. You see blemishes, scars, freckles etc. This is what I do. I look at my skin in a mirror standing back and fill the page with a color. Next I get the darkest and lightest tones. After that I start playing with Photoshop to see what gives the "illusion" of skin. An artist uses illusion to make us think we see skin. So the steps are:

Basic Color
Lights and Darks
Texture

CHOW

Hello everyone I did some more fooling around and I found another method for making skin for sims. This new method (I am still using PhotoShop) is better and easier than the first one. It can easily translate into other programs.

The first two pictures are skin cell close-ups I created manually
The third one is how the skin looked in Photoshop.

PIC 1- I first added some noise to a pinkish, about 2.2%. I then used the Plastic wrap feature and left everything the same except the info in the windows. I changed it to: (Uniform checked and monochromatic checked)

Highlight strength 6
Detail 12
Smoothness 4

I now had a scaley picture. I used a feather brush to put in the spots.

PIC 2- This is shorter. Start with a peach canvas. I used the colored pencil and chaged the info to
so that the colored pencil was diagonal and you could see the marks made. I then used the Distort/Shear tool, and used the lasso tool to select certain parts to make the skin stretch in some areas

PIC 3 I used the same technique as first pic for this.

STEPS:
1. Add noise, 2.2%
2. Use plastic wrap. Put settings to:
5
5
1 (these settings are specific for sim skin)
3. You can use Distort/Shear to stretch skin in some areas.
4. You can use a feather brush with Color burn to add spots.

For the abdomen I selected the abdomen area with the lasso tool and plastic wraped it. I then selected the area outside of the abdomen and the abdomen area and plastic wraped it again. You can continue to plastic wrap, but be cautious.

I WILL UPLOAD SOME BODYSHOP PICTURES AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
I WILL POST PIC3 WITH MY BODYSHOP PICS.

very nice..I'm going to check out the other one.I was thinking about editing it also in Max.

I'm gonna try this, Thank You! Been wanting to make my own skintones for like ever! Thanks for this :D

i don't speak English en i can't work wich a PS can you upload yours work dan can we download en say too were we have to sent this image.

tank you!
I fron Brazil but i live in holland!

I am a dummie still. I opened the default maxis colors, the lightest one, forgotten i had it replaced with another default skin. made by Enayla. Ack. I will try again after removing the default one. As HP describes, it's a good idea to cut out small pieces from a picture with a real skin, and work with it. One can make many beutiful skins using this method too, which i am going to do. But without the brushes HP are using,
i have not Photoshop CS, but Photoshop 6. As far as i know, there are not special brushsets for this version.

Also note that there are now a couple tutorials - like one about how to preview your skin up close using milkshape, and another about all the filenames in the tutorials area, so go take a look

I have Photoshop CS2 but i'm wondering what the "feather brush" is and where it is at in fotoshop.

faerietalex3, I think by that they just mean a big fuzzy brush - one of the regular ones with a fuzzy edge.

o i c.. lol thank yu

The tutorial was great and helped me a lot but i dont have photo shop..However i do have and use a program called PhotoImpact by Arcsoft...Just wondering has anyone ever tried to use it to make skins????I have a blending problem when i did..I used same hue values and such and FACE was still darker...??

HystericalParoxysm those brushes cant be used with photoshop 7
i tried doing this but my skin came out really awkward? haha, but thanks for this!

It's more than a year later, but I still found this helpful. My skins have the color I want, but they're very dull. I was looking for a way to correct that, and I'm hoping that learning how to add highlights and shadows will do the trick.